Munich Media Labs Day brings global innovation community together

The Media Innovation Studio headed over to Munich at the end of February to participate in the second Media Labs Day, organised by the Global Alliance for Media Innovation (GAMI).

Brining media labs, start-ups and academic teaching and research labs together, the two-day workshop hosted by Lina Timm from Media Lab Bayern and GAMI’s Stephen Fozard shared examples of diverse innovation projects and sought to build new concepts to explore and networks to support them.

A range of labs from across the world spoke during the first morning. These included Denis Teyssou from AFP’s MediaLab who discussed video verificatio, Mett Kjul from nordjyskestartup.dk , Walid Al-Saqaf from Södertørn University College in Sweden, who demoed his social networking analysis tool and Germany’s Bjorn Staschen from NDR NextNewsLab discussed how his team are exploring mobile immersive journalism.

Delegates also visited a number of key innovation sites in Munich. Starting with to one of Germany’s national papers Süddeutsche Zeitung, a Pulitzer prize winner in 2017 for their investigative work around the Panama Papers.

The team also visited IBM’s Watson IoT Global Headquarters to explore how the company is exploring connected homes, connect manufacturing and design methodologies. This was an intriguing addition to the programme as it focussed on IBM’s innovation methods, which revolved around a commercial application of design thinking. Amid the high end tech, post-its and flip chart paper took centre stage.

2nd Day of #medialabday: We‘re working on concrete challenges. How to involve students? How to get newsrooms and labs work together? Which are the best innovation methods? pic.twitter.com/ihn9yIkp1w

The workshop on day two of the visit explored a number of themes: creative methods, the future of innovation labs, personalisation and a whole host of other topics in which labs from industry, academia and the start-up scene shared a common interest.

The Media Innovation Studio was one of the founding partners and associates of this group, which was formed by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers.

GAMI plans to hold the next Media Labs Day in the Autumn. We’re looking forward to it!